Speaker

Henry Walker

Grinnell College

Computer Science

641-269-4208

walker@cs.grinnell.edu

Can Computers Think? Accomplishments, Potential, and Constraints for AI

In 1985, artificial intelligence pioneer, Marvin Minsky, stated, ""Artificial Intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men."" Historically, such areas of
human expertise have included numeric and symbolic computation, chess playing, medical diagnosis, speech recognition, mathematical theorem proving, and student placement within courses. Today, programs successfully tackle such problems -- sometimes outperforming human experts. However, current programs still are far from the intelligent computers described in novels and movies. Thus, the question remains whether future computers actually could think.